lake

We are rowing the Slovak Championships, next week in Piestany, Slovakia. It may turn out to be an interesting regatta, with participants from the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and of course Slovakia.

It has all categories in one weekend, from 12 year olds rowing a 500m to Elite, to Masters rowing a 1km.

This lovely Spa town will be the site of my son Dominik’s first rowing race. He is taking the preparation very seriously. He is just a beginner in the single, but now he refuses to take a single light stroke during his trainings.

Let’s hope the weather will allow him to row at all.

Here are some pictures from yesterday’s training.

As you can see it needs a few more kilometers, but the most important thing now is that he is thoroughly enjoying it.

In the morning, Romana had to coach the girls, but because one of the launches still isn’t repaired, we went on the double rowing next to them. The girls were on singles, and they did 4x6min at 24spm. Romana and I just did technique and rowed next to them.

Then we had a few hours break. I used it to do an online training that I was due, in the club house, drinking hot tea and eating sandwiches.

At 1pm, Romana took the launch and did a technique workout with the girls.

At 2:30, I stroked a quad. We did 20x30sec/30sec rest. It was the first time we were out in a quad, this season, so it was quite a challenge to do this workout. We did it anyway, because we are thinking about registering for the Slovak Open of next weekend.

On CrewNerd, I saw 1:31 to 1:35 pace towards the end of the 30 seconds.

While we were steaming up and down the lake in our quad, our daugher Lenka was in the center of the town. We later heard there was a demonstration of Neo Nazis. About 2000 citizens organized an anti demonstration and blocked the Nazi marching into a part of town inhabited by many Roma minority people.

The police used tear gas on the citizens and arrested more than 50 of them.

Luckily, Lenka was in the shopping area, a few hundred meters away from the tear gas. We called her that the trams weren’t running from the train station, so she had to take another route home.

A first row with Radek. We launched at 6, took my double “Orca” on a lake that was relatively quiet, but not entirely without chop.

Pick Drills to warm up.

There was another double on the lake, who launched together with us. As they have been training together forever, and this was the first time in ages that Radek and I sit together, we turned a little earlier to avoid rowing next to them. Rowing next to them would probably have woken up our competitive spirits and would ruin what was supposed to be a good technique / steady state workout.

Did 2x12min, which is one lake length down, one lake length up. As we had turned early and the first leg was with tailwind, I ran out of lake with 15 seconds to go. Tant pis.

On the tailwind leg, the other double seemed to be slightly faster than we, rowing about 500m behind us. On the headwind leg, even though they were doing 26spm and we did 18spm, we had the same speed. Nice!

Then we did 4km of cooling down with technique drills.

“King of the mountain” followed by “Pimanov” (aka Top Quarter)

Pause after tap-down

Square blade rowing

I asked them how it went. They were happy that they had done a “steady state” 6km at 26spm. Interesting. When I do a 6km I count it as “hard distance”. May be just a nomenclature confusion.

This morning’s workout was scheduled for 6:15 AM (defined as time we push off the dock). Lately it is no problem for me to get up this early. I find that after about 7 hours of sleep I wake up with upper back pain. I have no problems whatsoever during the day or during workouts. Only in bed. Perhaps time to buy new mattresses.

This morning had a 20x1min/R1min on the menu. Last week, Boris suggested a 30″/30″ which I mistakenly remembered as “30 strokes on / 30 strokes off”, which is awfully close to 20x1min/1min which is a popular workout at my rowing club.

Tried to talk the Masters double into doing it with me but they had 4x5min or something like that.

The warming up was a bit shorter than normal because I didn’t want to row into a field of debris that was floating around the nude beach area.

I was a bit scared by this workout, and was afraid I would bail out early. Didn’t happen, actually.

It was 6 intervals from the nude beach to Sirka. Then 6 intervals headwind back to the nude beach. After these 12 intervals I was determined to finish the set. Six more intervals with tailwind, then two times one minute into headwind and I would be ready for the day. Somehow I got motivated by trying to better the number of meters for each interval.

It took me 16 intervals to figure out that I could lengthen the stroke a bit at the catch, row 29.5spm instead of 30spm and find quite a lot of boat speed in this way. Of course you have to have the fitness to sustain these long strokes. It doesn’t really show from the numbers but interval 17 was going to the wrong side of 2:00 pace until I slightly lengthened the stroke, which in 3 strokes brought the pace to 1:56. It may of course have been the GPS inaccuracy fooling me.

The weather was OK but the lake was again playing tricks, adding some breeze that created some waves when we started our workout. When we finished, the lake went to calm and flat again.

Here’s the “rollercoaster” picture (HR, speed and position in one Google Maps):

Romana was on the single today and she complained it is rigged too heavy. Also, my daughter Lenka will row on it.

So when I arrived at the rowing club I took a rigging hour. Increased the span from 158.5cm to 160cm, leaving scull length and inboard the same. Lowered the oarlocks by 5mm.

Did 16km of steady state today. 6km with an inboard of 89cm (using the Concept2 orange clams), the rest with an inboard of 88.5cm. The 89cm inboard corresponds to the overlap I used to row with. The 88.5cm inboard is the gearing I used to row with.

The idea is that the 89cm setting is for the girls and for me in headwind.

I did most of it at 20spm, except for 2 sets of 20 strokes >30spm, one of each with each setting. On feel, I liked the heavier gearing more.

20spm20 spm metrics

Here are the heart rate and spm graphs for the two parts of the row:

Lin=89cmLin=89cm, spmLin=88.5spmLin=88.5spm

The differences are really small. Still I will keep rowing at an inboard of 88.5cm, unless there is heavy headwind.

On the last 2km, rowing back to the club, I noticed an armada of 3 singles, 1 double and a coxed quad coming from our club. Our 13/14 year old training had begun.

I decided to hug the shore and avoid a collision course, but suddenly the coxed quad began to drift towards the shore.

I corrected my course and rowed between the boats. Then I noticed my son Robin (8 years) was coxing the coxed quad of 14 year old girls. He was lying in the front, coxing, waving at me and generally offsetting the balance of the boat.

A fun moment. Not sure if the girls appreciated it. But Robin is hooked on coxing now.

A long day at work. I looked at the wind forecast and decided to not go rowing until 7pm.

That turned out very well. There was almost no wind and really flat water. Long Pete Plan intervals were on the menu and I decided to do 3km, 2.5km, 2km, the dreaded waterfall session.

I also wanted to pay attention to technique so I decided to let the stroke rate go with the flow. Feed the boat with a stroke when it asks for it.

As I am still not completely accomodated to good technique. It is still hard work for me. After the first set I was already tired, but technique wise it was good. I turned around and did the second one, happy with each 500m completed. Splits were bad, meters per stroke as well. Turned around for the last set, the 2km. Technique was better now. Consistently above 8.5m per stroke, but that was because I was doing a slightly lower stroke rate. In the last 500m I took it up to 30spm.

When I finished I almost needed to feed the fish … For a few moments I couldn’t do anything else but just sit on my single and breathe.